Tara Brabazon: Bowling Google a googly

It comes as no surprise to learn that Germaine Greer is featured in Ladies Who Lunge, one of Professor Tara Brabazon's growing pile of published works. Like Greer, Brabazon is an iconoclastic Australian who has hit these shores with some force and begun to make waves in her own branch of academia. That book, says Brabazon, is "about women who are considered difficult". She is nothing if not prolific: her ninth book, The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded, on social issues and the internet, came out last week and her 10th is due in April.

She has the capacity to come at a variety of subjects from an unusual angle every time, taking her readers by surprise, and stimulating debate.

And she is the sort of person you can't help noticing. She greets me in a coffee bar at Brighton University immaculately made up and manicured. Her black and white striped shoes are offset by matching earrings and gloves, cut away at the fingers to show off long red nails.

This morning she is elated by the reaction to her inaugural lecture, given the previous evening and entitled Google Is White Bread for the Mind. "It was beyond full, mate," she beams. "There were over 450 people there and they were spilling out of the auditorium."

Mind you, it was hardly the biggest audience that she has addressed. "My record was 8,000 at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas." She is delighted to have attracted not only students, academics and university administrators, but also teachers and librarians from the wider community, to Brighton's Sallis Benney Theatre.

The librarians, in particular, must have liked what they heard. Her argument is that we need more investment in books. Students must not be allowed to accept as truth anything they can find through Google, including "facts" given credence by Wikipedia. User-generated content, she maintains, is creating an age of banality and mediocrity, and stifling debate.

And bloggers? "People I didn't want to talk to at high school are trying to force me to listen to them again," she says. "Yet so many wonderful books are published every day, providing the best research material in the world."

Not a hippy

In 2004, she founded an international community of academics, journalists, film-makers and musicians known as the Popular Culture Collective. One of its aims is to bring about more "incisive comment" online.

At the same time, she wants to ban her first-year students from using Google altogether. How on earth can she do that? "By refusing to mark anything that comes from material I haven't prescribed for them," she says with a mischievous smile. "Remember I'm a historian, mate, and I've studied Stalin. I'm not a hippy."

She is a passionate believer in promoting social justice, and that includes widening participation in higher education. "I give my first-years a good curriculum based on 200 extracts from refereed journals and books," she says, "and I'm happy for them to use those as sources exclusively.

"I'm not asking them to be independent scholars at this stage. Rather, I'm building what I call an information scaffold. I'm guiding them through complicated ideas, and getting them to read high-quality materials. Young minds are like diamonds. They need sharpening and polishing. Too many assumptions are made about their ability to manage the transition from school to university."

Is that a condemnation of the British school system? "No, it's not exclusive to this country. I've encountered it wherever I've taught." That includes higher education institutions in New Zealand, as well as Australia.

As a student, Brabazon lived at home in a working-class quarter of Perth, while she attended the University of Western Australia, where she acquired the first of her three bachelor degrees - in history, literature and education. Her father was an Irish Catholic carpenter and her mother a shop worker.

"They didn't want me and my older brother to have the life that they'd had," Brabazon says, "so they were obsessed with education.

"I was sent to a convent school. Strict? You weren't supposed to go out at night until you'd reached the menopause. On my last night at university, my Dad actually extended my curfew to one in the morning. I was 24 at the time."

She became rhythm guitarist in an otherwise "all-bloke" band called No Particular Hairstyle when she was still a teenager. One of her books, Liverpool of the South Seas, is about the indie and dance scene in Perth.

Another is called Playing on the Periphery: Sport, Identity and Memory. It deals, among other things, with her "ambivalent" passion for Australian cricket. Why ambivalent?

"Because cricket embodies the best and worst of Australia. I'm passionate about the game, but it has a very complicated racial history. A lot of top indigenous players have been excluded.

"One was Eddie Gilbert, who bowled the great Don Bradman while playing for Queensland against South Australia. In the book, I draw parallels between his career and Sir Don's." While Bradman became universally acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time, Gilbert was never allowed on to the international stage as a test player.

The inclusion of that story says something about Brabazon's priorities as an academic. "When I was 17," she says, "I read EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Well over 800 pages, as I recall - not the kind of work you could read today by scrolling down a screen. Anyway, I was struck by Thompson's phrase about wanting to rescue handloom weavers from the condescension of history. As a historian, I'm also interested in finding ways of keeping alive these stories of the disempowered."

Among these, she includes the elderly. Surprisingly for such a colourful extrovert, Brabazon lives not in Brighton but in more staid Eastbourne with her husband, Steve Redhead, who is a professor at the same university. "It reminds me a bit of Mandurah in Western Australia, which is also known as God's waiting room," she muses.

"Two or three years ago, I wrote an article about Mandurah entitled From Eleanor Rigby to Nana Net, exploring older people's lack of engagement with the digitised world. By the same token, elderly women in Eastbourne are not the most web-connected. But that doesn't mean they should be disconnected from history."

Minority groups

The exclusion of minority groups is explored in her latest book, The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded. "By revolution, I mean a capacity to diagnose social problems and a desire to intervene to bring about change," she explains. "It explores the political and citizenry issues thrown up by my last book, The University of Google."

That one came out in November. Her output is so fast that Ladies Who Lunge sounds almost pre-historic, having been published as long ago as 2002. Along with Greer, the "difficult" women discussed include Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a teacher who's famous in New Zealand, and an American wrestler called Chyna.

Oh, and her old friend Julie Burchill. "I disagree with 60% of what she says, but she writes better than almost anyone I can think of," says Brabazon.

And Greer? "She's a tremendous scholar who has changed the world."

Time will tell whether another outspoken Australian academic will become as well known. But for the time being, she's making waves on the south-east coast.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 39

Job: Professor of media studies at Brighton University and director of the Popular Culture Collective

Before that: Associate professor of media, communication and culture at Murdoch University, Western Australia

Likes: writing and thinking, the Pet Shop Boys, Rickenbacker guitars

Dislikes: militarism, war and violence, apathy, quitters, phone voting on television shows